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AGAINST RECYCLING – ENTROPY MAGAZINE

“In The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, the 2012 documentary companion to his 1997 book, The Plague of Fantasies, Slovoj Žižek constellates a series of ideological vessels, from Starbucks cups, Coca Cola bottles, the Titanic, and Jaws, to the corroding fuselages of commercial airliners gathered in the Mojave Desert. Žižek reminds us that the confrontation with these last containers, these landed leviathans, is essential to the critico-ideological comprehension of what I call capitalism and its discontents. However, in the precession of constellated ideological vessels, an essential feature of late-capitalism is missing. Žižek suggests that the purchase of, for example, Starbuck’s coffee might be offset by donation by the corporation to a humanitarian cause. Yet, what he might have cited as the palliative built in to all of the above, from the coffee cup to the shark, is that engagement is offset less by charity than by recycling. Recycling is capitalism’s greatest gift to itself, because it is not the product, or the ideological container, but it is our very desire forthat product that is being recycled.” – Extracted from Entropy Magazine